March 2003 Feature Story

Bang the Drum Slowly for OTHA

by Mark Hoffman

Otha Turner, the last of the great Mississippi fife-and-drum-band leaders, died on February 27th at the home of his daughter Betty. Turner, whose first name was often misspelled "Othar," was 94 and had lived for decades in Gravel Springs, MS, near Senatobia, where he raised horses, goats, hogs, cattle, watermelon, corn, and black-eyed peas. He led the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, a Mississippi hill-country fife band that combined traditional American military marches with syncopated African rhythms and melodies in pentatonic modes. Like his friends and fellow fife-band players the late Sid Hemphill and Napoleon Strickland, Turner made his own fifes by cutting cane reeds and burning holes in them with a hot poker.

Like many Mississippi bluesmen, Turner found fame only in his later years. In the 1950s he directed folklorist Alan Lomax to bluesman Fred McDowell, who lived in nearby Como. In 1978, Lomax recorded Turner for his documentary The Land Where the Blues Began. As Turner's fame spread beyond Mississippi, he made out-of-state appearances at festivals such as the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the Chicago Blues Festival, and the Centrum/Port Townsend Blues Festival. In 1992, he was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Turner appeared on "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" (incidentally, Rogers died the day before Turner) and was nearly cast in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? by the Coen Brothers, who considered him for the role of the blind prophet on the railroad tracks. His venerable version of "Shimmy She Wobble" kicks off Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. Turner was famous in northern Mississippi for his annual Labor Day picnics, which drew people from all over the world and featured impassioned homemade music, wild dancing, and barbecued goat. (As a long-time goat rancher, I'm appalled, but what are you going to do? Meat's meat, and a man's got to eat.)

Turner made his first full-length album, Everybody Hollerin' Goat in 1998, followed the next year by From Senegal to Senatobia, a collaboration with African musicians. Like his music, Turner, seemed ageless. When I met him last May in New Orleans, where he brought down the house at the annual Ponderosa Stomp, his energy level was astonishing. Not bad, I thought, for a guy who must be nearly 80 years old. He was 93. Ironically, Turner's daughter Bernice Pratcher, his manager and a member of Rising Star, died of cancer the same day as her father. They were laid to rest in a double funeral in Como-lowered into the ground with homemade cane fifes across their bodies.